Posted
by
samzenpus
on Thursday December 29, 2005 @05:46AM
from the hello-ladies dept.

miller60 writes "There are now more American women than men using the Internet, according to a new study from the Pew Center on the Internet and American Life on gender and use of the Net. While a slightly larger percentage of men than women are online (68 percent vs 66 percent), the larger population of American women tips the balance. Other findings: younger women and black women outpace their male peers by larger margins than the wider population."

It would also be worth considering how honest people were in participating in this survey.

For instance, it says that 21% of males visited adult websites compared with only 5% of women. In real life, both figures are probably a fair bit higher.

The survey also concluded that 10% of women seeked info on how to quit smoking, compared with only 5% of men who have a higher smoking prevalence rate than their female counterparts in the US. One would think that these days, the incentive to quit smoking is just

While I am willing to believe that not every male on the Internet has intentionally visited an adult website (okay, not 79%...) I refuse to believe that there's anyone, male or female, on the Internet that has never had an adult website visit them, whether via spam, or popups, or popunders, or...

Why? It's masculine to smoke, but not very feminine; thus it's more acceptable for a man to smoke, and less likely that he'll want to quit, whereas it's less socially acceptable for a woman to smoke and more likely that she'll want to quit.

Or it may be that guys tend to figure they'll tough it out themselves whereas women look for assistance. Or there could be another explanation.

But you run into trouble when you are sampling a small part of the population, even if you have a fair sampling, say the 6000 mentioned. If half of those go online, then you only have a sampling of 3000, of those, half are women, down to 1500. And if you are working out what women online prefer, your sample is becoming woefully inaccurate, as there is no way to have an accurate representation of all demographics.

1500 is still a good size for a sample *if* it is unbiased. For an unbiased sample, the error scales as the square root of the sample, so a quarter the sample size only doubles the error of the sample.

On the other hand, biasing can screw up your poll even with far larger sample sizes. For example, it makes little sense to measure the internet usage of the richest million people in the US and use that to extrapolate to the poorest million.

Ok, I'm not one to defend surveys much if at all given that many of them are biased and not done correctly, but the reasoning you mentioned is simply flawed. Surveys are not meant to be done on the entire population, because polling 280 million Americans would be an impossible and unfeasible task.

Surveys take a sample of the population to be polled and use that as a representative measure of the rest of the population. The sample size then is given a confidence interval of +/- percentage points (usually 5%) that indicate the accuracy of the poll, within a reasonable standard deviation. In English, this means that polls aren't 100% accurate, but a properly done survey should be accurate within 5% of the acutal figure the majority of the time.

Selecting a random sample from the population is often the hardest part of any survey, but can be done correctly. To flat out say that using samples means that the data is irrelevant is completely inaccurate.

Please read a little about statistical analysis.
Using your population number 280000000 and 6,403 people survayed that gives a 95% confidence (which is about the norm for this type of study) that the survey answers are correct and apply to people who were not surveyed. This is with an margin of error of 1.22% which means that survey results may vary by 1.22% in either direction. This is all provided that the people surveyed where a random sample of the US population.

It only shows that the person answering the survey said they go online. This is assuming that the person administering the survey recorded the answer properly, and the software didn't fail, etc. As far as your slashdot comment goes, this has potential merit.

Women who go online may be more likely than men who go online to answer a phone call from an unkown number. According to the last page of the PDF, they attempted to adjust for this and other factors and most likely would have added it into the marg

The reason why there are more married women online is because they all signed up for www.iwantanaffair.com. All the single men online are paying $30/month to www.iwantanaffair.com to meet these married women for affairs. But, then later they find out that all these hot women wanting an affair is actually Alan Ralsky and Scott Alan Bradley sitting in there underwear typing these adds and making a living at spamming (or at least until the FBI raided their houses and took there computers).

More people are finding out about the anonymity the internet is providing and women have an opportunity to thrive in a situation where they can have as many relationships that they would be unable or afraid to have in real life without pressure from society's norms (I am not talking about just women in the US who may already have this freedom but other countries too). You will soon find that what makes a man different from a woman will change soon as both of them get similar exposure, outdoor life and acces

Goes to show more women are spending time on the internet, be it as a stay at home mom or from their offices in the ivory towers......
The real question is do people actually pay for survey results like this...????

You got it wrong man! We gotta stop this! How long until your next deathmatch is spent camping the catering talking to chix? How long until your HUD has smart looking drapes? I tell you, the internet was made by the military to let us men blow shit up virtually and they can pry my mouse from my cold dead hands when women...

Good point. Ok, we'll let the cute ones use it. And the ones who put out. But that's it! Oh, and Sal's girlfriend too. Sorry Sal.

How long until your next deathmatch is spent camping the catering talking to chix? How long until your HUD has smart looking drapes? I tell you, the internet was made by the military to let us men blow shit up virtually

The best Quake2 sniper I ever knew was an old girlfriend of mine. I'll freely admit I wasn't the best Q2 player in the world, but I was far from the worst, too. In a one-on-one game she took me out 93 to 17. I was using every weapon at my disposal. She used nothing but the damn railgun. Eve

What the summary doesn't point out is that women and men seem to view the internet differently.

the research found that men value the net for the freedom it gives them to try new ways of doing things.
By contrast women like the opportunities the net gives them to make and maintain human connections.

The Pew report also found that men are more likely to use the net to get at all kinds of information about sports results, weather, news, job offers and consumer ratings for goods and services. Men were also more likely to use the net for recreation and to listen to music, gather information for hobbies and take part in online fantasy sports leagues.

All that is fine, but any research that doesn't mention porn must be flawed;)

We have occasionally asked users about visiting adult websites. The overall participation
rates have remained constant, from about 13% - 15%. Traditionally, three to five times as
many men as women have responded positively to this question.

The numbers they give are 21% of online men saying they visit adult websites and 5% of women.

All that is fine, but any research that doesn't mention porn must be flawed;)Your last comment was meant, I suppose, to be tongue in cheek. I don't think it's wrong, however. Anyone who has 'existed' online since the early days of the WWW *knows* that pr0n has not only been endemic to the 'net experience' but has in fact driven many of its key technologies - audio, then video streaming for example.

I understand that many people are squeamish about the subject, but if we're making a serious survey of net use, you're right - to entirely OMIT pr0n as a subject leaves an, er, gaping hole in the data.

It would be practically like a survey of automobile use without referring to commuting.

I love these utterly useless, US-centric "internet polls". They make it sound like the net stops at the borders. Ignorant people will be quoting these numbers for years to come, omitting the crucial "american" part.

It's interesting to scan down the list of titles different sources gave this same basic story. They all basically parrot back the headline the report used, but lots don't even get that right.

While several of the stories (like this one on/.) are saying a slightly higher percentage of women now use the 'net, the first bullet point on The Pew site [pewinternet.org] says "The percentage of women using the internet still lags slightly behind the percentage of men." Later in their summary Pew gives the bland tag news sources probably reacted to: "In most categories of internet activity, more men than women are participants, but women are catching up. "

The report itself [pewinternet.org] is far more wide-ranging, and most of its interesting content gets left out of the usual suspects. I mean, parents are more likely to be online than nonparents -- 80% to 60%, which is a BIG difference. And so on. Even dramatic stuff gets discarded in favor of a horse-race-between-the-sexes thing, here. And I'll bet Pew phrased their own headline as a gender gap thing as a way of getting the attention of news sources, too -- the problem perpetuates itself.

Why is it that general news sources touch on only one or two aspects of something like this, but the original source's press release is much richer in the same space? It's like the whole "force a dialectic on the story even if there isn't one" thing is causing reporters to discard tons of primary information to sell a faked-up conflict that isn't there. (The more tabloid a source is, the worse it gets, too. Fox makes a hell of a living pimping every story up like this.)

In a reporting world like that, reporters aren't being asked to turn stories on their heads. They're just regurgitating press releases and reinforcing stereotypes.

Amen. Just yesterday I saw a piece on BBC World News about vitamin D deficiency [bbc.co.uk] (sorry, the BBC News web link actually tells enough information to be useful). The TV spot didn't even tell how much vitamin D seems to cut the risk of certain cancers in half! By contrast, the UCSD press release [ucsd.edu] had plenty of useful information. What irks me is that they still send you on a wild goose chase to find a summary written by the scientists [ajph.org]. I think the problem is not only editors wanting tabloid content, but in

Read this report for more: about 14% of US adults have a below Basic literacy level for prose/documents (can't read a TV program or jury instructions), another fifth have only a "Basic" literacy level for prose/documents (cannot consult documents to find what

Hey, I come from a proud line of.JPGs you insensitive clod! I resent your insinuations regarding the virtues of the women in my family!

Our family name dates all the way back to 17th century Dutch merchants. Originally we were called "Punt-Jan-Pieters' Grootvaeder" ("Dot-Jan-Pieters' Grandfather", in a mysterious reversal of the normal practice of naming people "so-and-so's son or daughter")). It later got shortened to.JPG by a lazy government administrator.

Polls comparing the average behaviour of men and women are boring and useless. Frankly, who gives a damn what the differences between the average man and average woman is? Someone who is average, I guess...

What a pity someone doesn't look at the differences in the distribution of how men and women use the net. Here's my guess: the distibution of men who use the net is probably much wider than the distribution of women, that is, there are probably more male the female total power net geeks, and also more men than women who never use the net at all.

Perhaps if you had read the article rather than the extremely poor slashdot summary you would have realized that they DID study the distribution. This may surprise you, but the paper is 55 pages long and contains more than a single headline.

Correction to self, Women are roughly as likely to access internet from home or the internet.

The assumption of the report seems to be more that the general statement isn't as general in the article, and only goes for certain categories, like health and religion, none of which surprise me much, (see e.g. contents and subjects of women's magazines)

Could this suggest that there is actually a difference in the genders?

I initially started wondering "why bother with this trivia about who uses the internet" but then I realized why such research is done. Marketing. So, the real purpose isn't about differences in the sexes. The real purpose is to find new demographics to market crap to.

"This moment in internet history will be gone in a blink," said Deborah Fallows, senior research fellow at Pew who wrote the report."We may soon look back on it as a charming, even quaint moment, when men reached for the farthest corners of the internet, trying and experimenting with whatever came along, and when women held the internet closer and tried to keep it a bit more under control."

The least likely to go on line were young and single. The most likely to go on line were married people with children. So: if you aren't tied down, there are better things to do with your life than going on the internet. Once you are tied down then the internet is a viable alternative to having a life.

Having a life? Sounds like you either don't have kids or didn't get that young single lifestyle out of your system before you did. When I had my first child, I was a person who spent a lot of time away from home. I went out frequently to bars, malls, etc. When my daughter was born, I quickly lost interest in the bars and I tended to spend a lot less time at malls. The time I did spend at malls was spend mostly at toy stores, book stores, and Chuck E Cheese. I still interact with adults on a regular ba

The adult websites statistic should give you a view that this survey was not very accurate, but it's interesting to see women taking more of a view in the internet nowdays compared to a few years back (even if the numbers are exaggerated). You can't help but wonder wether this will change the marketing approach of some online businesses as they adapt to the growing number of females that they can sell to.

The report is based on what people said to questioners on the phone.They don't really know if the people were telling the truth.People have a variety of reasons to stretch the truth in phone interviews.

A better methodology is to watch people (without them knowing that you watch) -- then you get a better idea.

So if the Pew foundation wanted to see what folks do online, working with ISPs or botnet operators to spy on internet use would give a more accurate view of things.

Only asking folks what they do won't help if people are systematically underreporting. And in this case, if men or women under/over report at different rates, you may come to wrong conclusions about who does something more/less than the other.E.g. people will tend to underreport the "vice time" they spend online. Perhaps men grossly underreport, while women are more honest.

You might think women spend more time on vice, when in reality they don't.

I think this is only natural - as time passes the net will reflect the demographic of the outside world. More and more non-tech types will join the net. The fact is most IT, and developers are still men. These were the first people to start using the net.

I don't intend this as a flame, but give me a break. In nearly every area of life women differ from men. This is not a bad thing (I can't imagine being married to someone like me!), but it flies in the face of a segment of society that wants to believe that all gender differences are learned behavior and have no basis in genetics (nurture over nature).

Anyone who has both sons and daughters knows they are different, no matter how hard you try to androgenize them.

We need to get over ourselves and realize that difference does not equate to inferiority.

In my experience, female coders make more elegant code... I'm also amazed at how my girlfriend can explain abstract concepts (types, closures, etc) far better than I can, when she's practically a newbie programmer.:-)

And just how big is the rock that the rest of these people are living under?

I think e-mail is slowly dying actually. A lot of kids don't really use it instead preferring to use instant messenger. If a kid has their own computer with broadband access, that stays on 24x7, why not just use IM?

Spam really hurts the usefulness of e-mail for a lot of users. Personally, I've reduced my personal e-mail account to just notification from various things I'm involved in (school, bills, etc.).

The thing I like so much about IM is that only people who I've explicitly allowed to contact me can actually contact me. This means no spam. With logging, and grep, it's just as useful a communications history as e-mail.

Am I the only that is amazed? (or read the full survey!) at this line that says:

Order from Spam: 6% of online men. 5% of online women.

5%, even with a margin of error is still a lot. But i know that it is probably true. At a previous business that wasn't doing spam but were sending small email campaigns we were estimating a return rate of about 3%.

I just think this number is scaringly high... the reason spam works, spammers still have work, and my 6 years old email address receives over 500 spams a day!

so, yes, am I the only one amazed by this? I would have like to have more question on this topic, like what do you buy from spam? Are you satisfied with it? How often do you buy from spam? etc...

That can't be right... It's either:
A) More bots posing to be chicks.
B) More desperate older, fat and ugly chicks.
C) Tranies screwing up the numbers.
D) A scientific study done by a bunch of guys trying to get chicks to believe its ok to use the internet without the usual stigma being pinned to them so these same guys have an easier time finding dates and move out of their mom's basement.

they creating new Googles? big difference, I hope they are creating new Googles, but most likely the number of women doing that is still small. It is not such an advance for female-kind to do email and chatting online!

Who cares? Internet is just a media. Think about it as a telephone. People enjoy using it to chat with friend will continue to do so when using Internet. Many talk on the phone exclusively on business matter on the other hand. Some design to hack around (remember what's the origin of 2600?) the telephone network. We can find an analogue between the former phone commnunity to the Internet one (IM addicts/.com startup/hackers).
Nothing wrong/ primitive/ need to be fixed in terms of user activity profile. It is just a reflection of the society.